Transforming Student Engagement through Documentary and Critical Media Literacy

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONYoung people entering college today have grown up immersed in a multimedia digital environment. Yet, the classroom environment they encounter often reflects nineteenth-century pedagogy of walk and chalk, of a lone professor standing in front of a chalkboard. Research indicates that students learn more deeply and retain knowledge longer from visual media than from spoken words alone (Mayer 2001). For at least a decade, educational scholars have urged teaching critical media literacy through popular culture (Alvermann, 1999; 2000, Kellner, 2005; 2004). Popular culture is often an easy pathway to student engagement because it has already captured young peoples' attention, and then instructors can scaffold more difficult concepts around that interest. The images that drive much of popular culture may be part of the key to this as a pedagogical strategy. Despite this research there is resistance to the visual in classroom instruction, especially in the social sciences. Although there is long tradition of using films in the classroom, this practice is viewed with disdain by some because it makes students passive rather than active learners (Pippert and Moore, 1999). Implied in this criticism are a number of interwoven ideas about the book as text and the visual as text. It suggests, first, that students are actively engaged in reading books in a way that they are not, indeed cannot be, with visual media. It also suggests that written texts, such as books and scholarly articles, are separate and disparate from visual texts, such as documentaries. In this paper, I take issue with both these notions through an investigation into the pedagogical effectiveness of using documentaries along with texts to engage students through critical media literacy in ways that encourage transformation.My focus here is on documentaries to the exclusion of feature (or narrative) films as a method of teaching and learning. This presents certain advantages and challenges. Any discussion of documentaries must include addressing the problem of truth, as it is a medium that by its very nature asserts a claim to truth-telling. This claim to truth is what led one scholar to refer to documentaries as containing a (Banks, 1990). In some ways, the seductive veracity of documentaries makes them especially well suited to the college classroom, when coupled with instruction in how to critically read these visual texts because it encourages students to challenge media messaging.PARADIGM SHIFTS: DOCUMENTARIES, DIGITAL MEDIA & DISTRIBUTIONThis research is situated at the nexus of two distinct yet overlapping paradigmatic shifts: 1) the burgeoning field of documentaries along with the simultaneous democratization of the form; and, 2) the emergence and widespread adoption of Internet technologies which have profoundly changed the distribution of documentaries at the same time that these technologies are changing the way students approach learning. Today, there are simply more documentary films in existence than ever before due to the rise in the independent and documentary film industry (Renov 1993), widespread use of digital video cameras by the general public (Bernard 2007), and the rise of documentary-style television (Hogarth, 2006). Prominent documentarians such as Michael Moore (e.g., Sicko, 2007; Farenheit 9/11, 2005), Davis Guggenheim Waiting for Superman, 2010; Inconvenient Truth, 2006), and Morgan Spurlock (e.g., Supersize Me, 2004) have experienced mainstream commercial success with the theatrical release of their films. In addition, documentary-style television shows (e.g., Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch are just two examples of an entire genre) and made-for-television documentary series (e.g., Transgeneration for Sundance Channel) abound on cable channels (Arthur 2005; Austin 2005; Hogarth 2006). HBO Documentaries led by Sheila Nevins, an arm of the cable powerhouse HBO, has built an impressive archive of documentary entertainment over twenty years, many of those titles concerned with social issues. …